A quick fix for your slow Chrome browser

Is using Chrome like watching paint dry? This tweak might help.
Screenshot by Rick Broida/CNET

Calling all Chrome users: Does your browser seem slow of late? I may have a solution for you.

First, a little back-story. I run a Samsung Series 9 Ultrabook with a Core i5 processor and Windows 8.1. I've had it about 18 months, and I know from years of experience that, over time, PCs slow down.

Usually I point the finger at Windows, because whenever I've taken the drastic step of wiping my hard drive and reinstalling the OS from scratch, I get a blissfully speedy system again. For a while.

But in the past few months, I've noticed that my Web browser, Google Chrome, has really gotten slow. (I can't be positive, but I think the timing coincided with Microsoft's required update to Windows 8.1 from Windows 8, which happened in October. That's my conspiracy-theorist explanation.)

Although Chrome itself would open quickly, tabs seemed to take forever to load. When I opened a new tab and typed in an address (or even clicked a bookmark), there was often a delay of several seconds before anything would happen -- I'd just be staring at a blank tab for what seemed an eternity.

Needless to say, I tried removing most of my Chrome extensions, even the ones that seemed like they couldn't possibly impose a performance hit (like my beloved OneTab). I tried deleting my browsing history, cached files and other behind-the-scenes detritus. Nothing helped.

This got aggravating to the point where I thought, "Well, maybe it's time for an upgrade." Which is ridiculous because this laptop has all the horsepower I need. It's just the browser that's killing me.

I even went so far as to spend a day working in Firefox, just for sake of comparison. And you know what? Huge difference. So the problem wasn't Windows, necessarily -- it was Chrome.

OK, enough history, now for the fix: After some research and experimentation, I tweaked one setting that made Chrome run considerably faster. Your mileage may vary, of course, but this is worth a try:

Screenshot by Rick Broida/CNET

Step 1: Click the Menu button (top-right corner of the browser, below the Close button), then click Settings.

Step 2: Scroll down and click "Show advanced settings," then scroll down further until you find the System section.